


The Cartographer

by paperiuni



Category: Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor
Genre: F/F, Fate & Destiny, Female Friendship, Gen, Pre-Femslash, Self-Image, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 17:58:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5465693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliza Jones adjusts to a new life, considers destiny, and finds a way with the queen of the Far Isles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cartographer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [perculious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perculious/gifts).



> This fic contains some questions of identity (not the sexual identity but the self-image kind), and non-graphic discussion of Eliza's terrible childhood.
> 
> x
> 
> Dear recipient, I hope this is to your liking, and I wish you a merry Yule!

Life in the Far Isles had turned out to be both more mundane and more mysterious than Eliza had envisioned. Looking at Scarab, Nightingale, and the rest of the queen's party, you might've had the impression that all Stelians were imposing, magnificent warrior-mages who could fell armies with a flair of their hand.

There _were_ Stelians who fit under that description. More than that, every person she'd met since coming to the islands seemed aware of their people's fearsome mandate in a way that went beyond mere knowing. It wasn't just fact to them, like "The planet is round, or rather, an oblate spheroid", or "The duskdeer gather in midsummer". It was the essence of their lives. It underlay the daily work of fishermen and gardeners, weavers and potters, the children at their discus game in the harbour plaza and the men mending the roof of a boathouse by the turquoise curve of the bay.

Even those Stelians who kept the island kingdom running day to day, dedicated their lives to the Cataclysm. Maybe their parts were humbler, but Eliza knew what it was to be part of an interwoven whole. Snap a thread, and all felt the unravelling.

Elazael's memories were stunningly vivid on that part. So much so that Eliza sometimes felt the surge of an immense lack within herself: here had been others, welded to her mind and her magic. The Faerers of Meliz were gone, dead or banished for all eternity.

She dawdled on the roof as the shadows shortened. As the queen's guest, she had only to ask for what she needed, but a month was a short time to make the archipelago feel like home.

She'd told Zuzana and Mik she wanted to go to Eretz. It'd felt like the only possibility. What was she going to do on Earth, her doctorate abandoned, her supervisor thinking she'd lost her mind?

By the goodwill of two strangers, she'd found her mind. That wasn't quite right. Her mind had expanded to fit all it had to contain. Right now, she was late to a meeting with the royal archivist so they could continue mapping some of those extremes of knowledge.

The rush of wings from behind her made her look back. Like a thunderous seabird, her hair an ebony banner that settled on her shoulders, the queen of the Stelians alighted on the reed-thatch roof next to Eliza.

"Elazael."

"Eliza, please." Eliza tried to straighten. Balancing on the rooftop made curtseying awkward at best. For all her haughty mien, Scarab was closer to her people than Eliza pictured a royal personage being; thus the lack of formality might be excused. "I mean, Majesty, you really should call me Eliza. Elazael is..."

An awful childhood. A skein of memories ever unspooling in her mind. Joy and terror, misery and a wellspring of meaning in one name.

"I see," Scarab said before Eliza found the right explanation. "Something that you are, but not you. I'm aware of the distinction."

 _Are you?_ Eliza wondered, then squashed the thought. Between all that'd happened in Morocco, in Rome and then in the Adelphas Mountains on one hand, and the snowmelt flood of Elazael's knowledge in her on the other, she had a lot left to process.

"Right. Newfound wings and magic powers notwithstanding, I'd rather be me." She, who'd spoken in the words of world-shaking prophecy and opened an unknown path for all of them. Scarab's advisors were digesting that in a hallowed silence for now, though the news would shake her people whenever she chose to make it public. Scarab herself, though, was here. "What can I do for you?" Eliza went on, a bit stilted.

Scarab shifted. She had a raptor focus in her tawny eyes, but they'd wandered over to the bay. "Nightingale tells me you're to start lessons with her."

"Telesthesia. I used to know, and I used it when... when I told you all about the godstar thing." In the light of day, the notion of her prophecy seemed to loom rather than beckon. "But there's so much in my head. It's like sifting through a haystack, and every stalk is something you should know."

"It'll come in useful. The islands are scattered, and we rely on the mindlinks to ferry information."

"Can all of your people actually do magic?" Eliza knew that with the proper tithe, Karou had taught even Zuze and Mik some minor glamours. Telesthesia was far cry from a cloaking charm. "I heard about what you did to the warriors of the Empire, but... that was you."

"Magic comes naturally to us, as does flight." Scarab shifted her wings. They were quiescent, like banked coals ready to flare at her will. "Our enchantments would seem grand to the other seraphim, but the price we pay is much greater. We don't trifle with it."

"If those builders could just wave a hand and fix the roof..."

"That's Reef there, on the ridge of the roof." Scarab gestured--calling it pointing would've ascribed it too much freedom--at a broad-shouldered, grey-braided man, who was tying a bundle of reeds in place with plant-fibre rope. "He used to advise my mother. When I took the crown, he stepped down. He said he wanted to work with his hands again. If he wished, he could dance the roofing right up there." Something wistful threaded into her voice.

"But it'd cost him."

"And doing it by hand gives him peace, or perhaps meaning."

Eliza felt her own focus as a tremor in her muscles. She'd craned her head to peer at Scarab's singular face and found there a look of unstudied yearning, as if Scarab were staring at some other vista than the shimmering sea beyond the beach.

 _Normal as pie and dandelions_ , Eliza thought. Her childhood reverie seemed to shine back at her in Scarab's faraway expression.

She should've said something, but every single thing that popped in her mind might've broken the spun-sugar moment. When she'd told the gathered crowd, seraphim, chimaera and human, that a destiny awaited all of them, she'd felt the tug of it herself. There'd been wonder in Scarab's keen eyes then, though a more astonished kind than the wry look she now wore.

"I digress." Scarab diverted Eliza from her thoughts. "I was supposed to tell you that Nightingale wished to see you. About the lessons."

"Oh. That's very considerate." _Does the queen of the Far Isles moonlight as an errand girl in her spare time?_ "Thank you, Majesty." The title felt like a crutch, but one she needed. "I'll go as soon as I'm not late to my other appointment. Which I am."

Scarab's face didn't so much harden as firm, her mouth settling into its usual austere line. "Of course. I should be going, too. I'll be needed in the Circle soon."

The Circle, shortly named and so known to every denizen of the islands, was the place where Scarab and her magi held vigil over the weave of the world. Eliza had only glimpsed it from a distance. The Stelians had built their communities along the shores of their fertile isles, where the bounty of land and sea met, green joining blue, but their most solemn duty was conducted upon the forested crest of the main island. Not far from the temple of the godstars, the Circle was an oval of pillars carved from the volcanic bedrock--whether by hand or by magic. The very sound of the word felt like a weight.

"Good luck then?" Did Scarab, her arms and forehead banded with gold, her posture hard with resolution, look like a person in need of luck? All her life, she'd kept back the unspeakable calamity Eliza's foremother had wrought. Eliza felt inane. "I... hope it goes well."

"Thank you, Eliza," Scarab said, her eyes keen as she glanced her way, and took to the air in a surge of heat from her wings.

X

So Eliza went about her day: meeting the archivist, a lunch in her room in the Queen's Keep, and visiting Nightingale on the south terrace of the keep. It was in truth neither a fortress nor a palace: a blending of airy rooms and terraces of carved wood, and spacious hallways that went into the cliff upon whose face the keep sat.

Nightingale received Eliza with the same softly melancholy courtesy she showed to everyone, except maybe Akiva. In spite of that she asked piercing questions of Eliza's surfaced knowledge of telesthesia. Even though they only attempted a few focus exercises, Eliza left feeling thoroughly cross-examined.

The next day, after lesson number two, she found herself poking around in the waterline of the rich yellow beach. She was getting used to the wings, and no mistake, flying _was_ fantastic, but sometimes you wanted to feel the sand between your toes.

A fan-shaped scallop shell had been carried up by the morning tide. It was about an inch across, and the mother-of-pearl of the inside shone with more luminous colours than she'd ever seen on an Earth seashell. Buried in the sand a few steps away was its perfect pair, and next to that one, a tiny, carmine nautilus shell, equally otherworldly in its size and hue.

 _You're twenty-four, Eliza Jones_ , she tried to scold herself. Nightingale had given her a series of meditations to try out by tomorrow. Picking seashells outside the fishing harbour probably counted as shirking duty. On the other hand, it also counted as a precious slice of normality, at a time when she was still defining what _normal_ even meant.

That was all she'd ever wanted to be. Someone ordinary. Instead, here she was under the purple sky of another world, her pair of new-old wings swaying with her steps, her hair gathering windblown petals drifting from the ridiculous green of the forest. By any definition, she probably couldn't see normal with a telescope.

She bent to brush sand from a sienna seashell that jutted out against the sole of her bare foot. In the end she had twelve and twelve, scallop and nautilus, in a bevy of shades as lush as the rest of the island. There had to be something to the quality of the sunlight that magnified and brightened the colours until they dazzled you. She tied her loot into the wide sash of her tunic and walked back towards the town as night drew its velvet shawl over the sea.

X

Some relative of darkmoss grew on the Far Isles, and the Stelians cultivated it in carved stone dishes to serve as a light source. The landing terrace of the keep was illuminated by the crackling wings of the sentries, but the corridor leading inside from there was limned by the soft glow of the mosses.

Eliza let her wings dim and counted the turns under her breath, so preoccupied that the next right turn saw her nearly walk into someone.

"Sorry!" She clutched at her bundle of shells, looking wide-eyed up at Scarab.

Scarab, with her hair curling damp and fragrant around her shoulders. She wore a fine fallow tunic down to her calves, the kind favoured by most Stelians. Without their burden of bracelets her arms looked strangely soft.

"We keep finding each other these days," she said. "You are excused."

Was that a joke? Was the Keeper of the Cataclysm allowed to joke? Was that a thing that happened?

"I wasn't looking where I was--" It could have been a trick of the light--lamps, here, oil burning with steady blue flame--but all of Scarab's tight-drawn lines seemed slackened. There were shadows under her eyes, the kind that suggest either a row of all-nighters or a more permanently benighted existence.

That, or a visit to the Circle. It'd been a day and night and a day again. Eliza was already used to several of her Stelian acquaintances going up at intervals, and staying for anything from a few hours to an entire night.

"Sorry," she said again. Oh, god, she wanted to ask. "I was just going to my room. I was going to make something."

"What are you making?" It wasn't an unkind question. It was just delivered like a fired arrow, the way words tended to spring from Scarab with purpose.

"A game." Eliza unwound the sash to reveal the top of her seashell pile. "We used to play this one in the lab while waiting, on our phones, but, surprise, mine ran out of charge last week. It's not like I was using it, anyway."

Not the whole truth, but all of it that she could give in this company--in any company.

"Two kinds of shells for game pieces, I presume. Do you have a board, then?"

"I thought I'd draw it, for starters." Eliza lifted a cream-coloured scallop shell to turn it in her fingers. "Your archivist gave me some paper. I guess the only thing I'm missing is someone to play against."

One of Scarab's thin brows rose, and her mouth, soft and unpainted, pursed thoughtfully. "I don't have any duties until morning. It always... takes some time to return from the Circle."

On a heart-deep level, Eliza knew that she meant more than the half-hour's flight to the upper reaches of the island.

"Okay," she said, in a thistledown voice. "It's probably weird to invite you to my room when I'm your guest, but would you like to come up?"

When Scarab nodded, it felt like a triumph.

X

Most of the Stelians lived, ate, and worked communally, sleeping in the longhouses and planting, weeding and harvesting the terraced fields. Their queen lived with similar modesty despite her station, but her abode offered a few added luxuries. Eliza had a room of her own, with a broad veranda and a feather-soft bed whose mattress was stuffed with sweet-smelling bluish grass. She kept finding blades of it on the floor.

Now she swept one surreptitiously out the veranda door and set another sitting cushion at the table, made of a burnished piece of driftwood. Scarab dropped down to sit and folded her ankles. She watched as Eliza laid out the paper and the charcoal and drew three concentric squares, then four lines that bisected each side of the squares, joining the innermost one to the outermost.

"It looks like a warding circle," Scarab said.

"It does?" Eliza didn't raise her gaze from the paper.

"The square is the symbol of the world, and its elements are three." Scarab pointed at each of the squares, subtly smudging Eliza's handiwork. "Sky, stone, sea."

"Right." Again, out of the current of Elazael's memories, the concept of a _warding circle_ came to her. Much of the magic left to the seraphim was small and swift--charms of protection and invisibility. There'd been other kinds: slow and intricate weavings that made wooden buildings strong as marble, or lightened the limbs and cleared the minds of the aging, granting them new years of life. Some could even strengthen the Veil itself.

She offered a smile. A slight, warm and sweet thing that still felt new on her face. "Now, it's a game board. This game's got many names, back on Earth, but we called it Mills."

Scarab sat, ramrod straight in the centre of Eliza's cosy, unassuming room, and let Eliza lay out her twenty-four seashells.

Twelve black pieces, twelve white ones, moving across the grid of her mind while she lay in the dark. She'd seen the board in the hospital and memorised it. When her mother came to bring her home to her destiny, Eliza carried the game and its rules with her like a rebellious secret. Pie and dandelions and a game she'd play against herself while surrounded by people who hoped for a drip of her divine calling to splash onto them.

_I have maps in me but I am lost. I have skies in me but they are dead._

_White makes a mill in the lower right-hand corner, up from the corner point._

"As you wish," Scarab said into the silence pooling between them. "Only a game, called Mills."

 _You're right_ , Eliza nearly blurted out. _It_ is _a warding circle, a charm against evil. I drew it every night when they wouldn't leave me alone._

"So," she said instead. "We both have twelve pieces, and three pieces in a line on the board make a mill."

X

The lamp on the table was low on oil, the flame flickering; the mugs of lantern-fruit tea Scarab had had brought from the kitchen were yielding the last of their lacy steam into the air.

"And I win." Scarab plucked the fatal third one of Eliza's scallop shells from the board.

"Finally." Eliza chuckled. "That was the slowest game of Mills I've ever seen."

"You told me I could take my time to think." Scarab's dark tresses had dried into a curling halo, glossed by the lamplight. "It's much more complicated than it looks. The board is simple, but the variations are endless."

"That's why I like it." Eliza rocked back in her cross-legged position. That was true, just as it was true that the combinations of the game had helped keep her mind centered, so it couldn't burst into shrapnel of despair and misery.

Could you still love a thing so meshed with sorrow?

And, while Scarab scooped the pieces from her hand-drawn board and arranged them in rows on each of their sides, Eliza wondered if she did mean the game when she thought of that. In the lost birth-world of the seraphim, the Stelians alone had opposed the great Faering. Elazael had brought word of the Cataclysm back to Meliz, and upon her heels had been the _nithilam_. It had been Scarab's ancestors who'd shouldered the burden of keeping them at bay.

Behind the open door of the veranda, Nitid rose into view. Eliza considered a polite goodnight and begging the excuse of her morning lessons. Something churned in her stomach.

"Eliza." Scarab said then. She held her mug with both hands before sipping. "A question, if you please?"

"Does a queen have to ask that?" Eliza felt some part of her uncertainty slough away, like a load of spring snow from a tree branch.

"You aren't my subject." Scarab's eyes narrowed as she glanced up at Eliza; not with hostility or suspicion, but definitely with scrutiny. "In fact, whatever you are, you are unique. That's a dangerous thing to be."

"Look--" _This is it_ , Eliza thought, with a force that was familiar from one other moment in her life: the moment she'd decided to run. "I didn't ask for this. Not the visions, not the wings, not the amazing unexplored archive of eldritch lore in my head." _Not the growing up in a cult, not the hiding my tracks for years._

At any other time Scarab's frown would probably have cowed her. Eliza was mild and mellow at heart, but she'd had to gird this particular topic with every conviction she had.

"I tried to get away from all this." She was aware that her voice pitched oddly. "I tried so hard, and it found me, anyway."

Scarab's face changed as if someone had yanked away a veil. The scrutiny remained, but her eyes lit up with dawning comprehension. " _Ananke_ ," she muttered.

"I mean--the point is," Eliza said, because she wasn't done, no ma'am, "I haven't sworn fealty or whatever it is you do here. But _I know_. I know better than anyone you could ever tell. I've seen what happens if we fail. I _will_ be part of this fight."

"Eliza, Eliza." Scarab rose, her palms up and open, a gesture of not placation so much as beckoning. It occurred to Eliza, in a distant way, that Scarab seemed the kind of person who'd be inept at comfort. "That isn't what I was going to ask."

"Then what?" A noose of dread tightened her throat. Hadn't she had her fair share of freakouts and then some?

 _I want you to believe me._ That was the crux, a different kind of fear. Her own conviction didn't waver. The possibility that Scarab would doubt her was what dismayed her.

"I... wasn't going to ask that, but you answered part of my question." Her movement slow, Scarab knelt next to her. "My people haven't been told what you prophesied in the Kirin caves. My guard and my advisors know, but I haven't spoken to the rest."

Eliza smiled damply. It felt like a heroic task. "I guess that's good. Back then, it seemed so clear. Right?"

"I remember. I will never forget."

"I don't even mean that it feels less clear now." She could close her eyes and relive the moment in perfect replication: her words, everyone's faces, Scarab joined to her, mind to mind, soul to soul, smooth and boundless.

That absolute clarity was still in her. Now she had to carry it through the beats of her everyday life, which had not stopped just because she'd shone a light into the future.

"You mean that knowing it is different from living it?" When Scarab pressed a dry hand against the back of Eliza's, she took it at once. Wordless gratitude at the support eclipsed the presumption of clasping a queen's hand. And, as she'd asserted, Scarab was not _her_ queen.

She was more. The captain to Eliza's cartographer, the general answering her signal fire. 

"Yes." Eliza breathed. "It's like you see the road and then you have to actually walk it. Or maybe _make_ it."

"I know something of that," said Scarab. "I was born to this role. My mother was queen before me, and my grandmother before her."

Eliza nodded, without letting go of her hand.

"My people walk closer to the Veil than the other seraphim. Sometimes it whispers to us about the path we're supposed to take. We call it _ananke_ , this pull of fate, and it's a sacred duty to follow it when it shows itself to you."

"I thought you already had a calling." The humour in Eliza's voice was brittle. _What's wrong with me?_ No one of her family could ever touch her again. She'd gathered the shells for the game on a whim--a whim not unlike that which had made her challenge the first lab partner to a Mills match on her phone. It'd been an attempt to salvage something good from the wreck of her old life. Or, it'd been a pang of nostalgia that Scarab's offer to play with her had transformed into something more.

"I have a duty, and I can't lay that aside." Folding down to sit, Scarab gathered her hands in her lap, and took Eliza's left one along. Eliza let her. "All my people share in this duty, but sometimes _ananke_ lays open a way to accomplish it that was hidden to us.

"I thought my fate was to keep the Cataclysm until that task killed me." How sure she sounded, speaking of her impending death. Before she could think twice, Eliza squeezed her hand tighter. "Then you spoke your words." Scarab looked up, her amber eyes clear and certain. "And I knew."

Eliza had to close her own eyes. "I know. I felt it, too."

There had been that instant of singular, breathtaking intimacy between them: all walls down, subsumed in each other, united in knowledge and in intent. Eliza had never been in love, but she had to recognise that as a kind of love in itself: the will to stand side by side against whatever would come. It hummed in her as if she were a singing instrument.

Which was what she had been, in that moment: a conduit of the truth that'd poured through her.

Here, then, was Scarab: a hard woman of warm flesh and blood, valiant and high-hearted, stern and devoted. Eliza had known her and yet knew little of her as she was, day to day.

"So... let me get this straight. This voice of fate told you you were supposed to fight the _nithilam_ , and that makes it okay?" That was probably insensitive. To her astonishment, Scarab huffed in a most unregal way.

"To put it simply, yes. I know it sounds outlandish to you."

"A little," Eliza said, which was not the whole truth, yet again. "You may have figured out that almost _everything_ you do sounds odd to me, though, because it's new."

"What about your--" Scarab made a small, stymied hand gesture. "Elazael's memories?"

"Are a thousand years out of date on the 'Daily Life Among the Stelians' chapter."

"Of course. How foolish of me."

"Not at all." Eliza shook her head for emphasis. "Look. I came back here so I could help, and I did, but the work isn't done. You know that, and so do Nightingale and Akiva, Karou and all the others."

The lamp guttered at last, as she spoke, but Nitid shone a slash of silver light across the room. A soft, briny wind rolled in from the ocean.

"Yes," Scarab said, low and somehow mournful. "And you are the torch we must follow."

"I don't mind that," Eliza muttered. "I'm ready for it. It's just that I can't give up being me to do it."

"How do you mean?" A touch of awe or wonder in Scarab's tone, an echo of her expression on the rooftop earlier. They were whispering, both of them.

"I mean that... that I need life to keep happening. I want to walk on the beach, and watch Reef mend his roof, and listen to Melliel sing. I want to teach you Earth games and ask about how you manage to be both what you are and _who_ you are, and..."

 _And I want to know you, as you are._ Eliza had never been to war. She'd even arrived in Eretz to see the age-old conflict between seraph and chimaera laid to rest. There was blood on the horizon, but while they had peace, while they had time, she longed for simpler things. Friendship, learning, days together. Working out a new normal.

It might have been a horrible misstep, that assumption of intimacy. Then Scarab shifted, breaking the handhold at last, and sat back next to Eliza so their knees rested together.

"You travelled a long way to come home," she said. "If you wish it, the Far Isles will welcome you. I welcome you."

Following Nitid's path across the ink-black sky, Ellai rose from the forested arms of the island. The wind moved in the treetops like a lazy hand stroking a cat's coat, stirring the dew-laden treetops and lifting the wet verdant smell into the air.

"You know," Eliza said. "I don't think I know a single constellation in this sky. That could be a good thing to learn, while I'm figuring out the whole mindlink thing. I'd have something to steer by."

Scarab gave a dark, warbling laugh, and it cracked something gently in Eliza's heart. Not a violent split, but a tiny opening, welling with rich possibility. "It would be a fine night to go flying."

Eliza got to her feet, curled her toes to get the pins and needles out of them after the long while of sitting, and shrugged her wings open.

She threw herself airborne. The wind caught and lofted her, her pinions sparking against the darkness, and Scarab followed at her heels.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Friend #1 and Friend #2 for irreplaceable writing company. You know who you are.


End file.
